Watergate Tape: Nixon's Lost Minutes May Be Recovered

When former President Richard M. Nixon waved his famous, awkward goodbye from the door of the presidential helicopter Marine One and left the White House in disgrace 35 years ago, he also left behind an enduring mystery.

It surrounds a June conversation between the president and his chief of staff three days after the infamous 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The discussion between Nixon and H.R. "Bob" Haldeman was captured by the president's secret White House recording system, except for an 18 1/2-minute gap where the tape was later erased.

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Efforts to electronically salvage the lost audio from the actual tape have not worked in the past, leaving historians to rely on Haldeman's normally detailed handwritten notes for clues about what he and Nixon talked about.

He is now the chief technology officer for Turiss LLC, a Virginia-based company that develops software and strategies to fight cyber and financial fraud. "Haldeman," Mellinger said, "destroyed the first 17 minutes of his notes and left the conclusion of his notes, which was not incriminating."

The two remaining pages of notes from the meeting -- written by Haldeman on yellow, lined pads -- are stored at the National Archives facility in College Park, Md. Mellinger, who has examined the documents, says there are faint impressions on the pages, made by a ballpoint pen writing on the pages above them.

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Those indentations, Mellinger believes, could be deciphered with a forensic technique called electrostatic detection analysis.

Electrostatic Detection Works Wonders

Forensic experts say it has been used to examine countless documents since being developed in the early 1980s by a British company.

"It's been a godsend," said Albert Lyter, president and chief scientific officer of North Carolina-based Federal Forensic Associates. "We use it routinely for things like bank robbery notes. You might find a grocery list embedded on a bank robbery note or, if you're lucky, somebody's name and address. It's been really useful."

It works by placing the original document under a thin plastic film. An electrostatic charge is applied to the page and then, tiny glass beads and black copier toner are cascaded or carefully brushed over the document.

"What happens is the black particles will congregate in the areas where the indented impressions are," Lyter said. "So you can actually read the writing that's there."

It's not clear that Haldeman's notes, now more than three decades old, would reveal anything. Experts say it depends on the environmental conditions at the time the notes were written and the conditions under which they've been stored since then.